The War on Terror

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9/11 World:

This Is the Way We Live Now

The war on terror will only happen if America leads it.

BY DANIEL HENNINGER

Friday, September 10, 2004 12:01 a.m.

That bloody carnage at a grade school in Beslan, Russia, last week made one thing clear: Now we are all living in 9/11 World.

9/11 World, defined by Islamic bombs that are designed to blow to pieces the bodies of civilians where they reside, work or go to school, now rings the world from New York to Moscow, Madrid to Jakarta, Jerusalem, Rome, Nepal and Fallujah. The rubble of New York looks like the rubble of Beslan.

This is 9/11 World, where tears flow constantly for the bleeding and burial of innocents. Three Septembers ago in America, children buried their fathers and mothers. This September in Russia, fathers and mothers bury their children. Even this universal ceremony of grief is desecrated by the designers of 9/11 World, for they leave little or nothing to bury.

It is appropriate, with the slaughter of children in Beslan, that the people of the United States should have the chance to issue a collective opinion about the reality of the world we live in now--this constant murdering of people engaged in the mere act of urban life. The U.S. is holding a presidential election. If there really is such a thing as a war on terror--that is, an active, sustained effort to unplug its principal actors--then we know it will happen only if the United States leads it. The statements of resolve this week by the presidents of Russia and Indonesia are welcome. But absent active U.S. leadership, Islamic terrorism will come to be tolerated by other national leaders--as was the Balkans, as is Darfur--as inevitable and unfortunate phenomena, like hurricanes. France, Germany and Spain have proven that.

But one may assume that for most, if not all, Americans since September of 2001, 9/11 World is unacceptable. They won't live in a world where civil society must get used to having barbarism parked at the curb. In November they will decide which candidate and which party's attitude will lead them away from accepting a modus vivendi with hell.

I say both candidate and party because one wishes that John Kerry were running on a more settled party policy on terror. Wednesday in Cincinnati Mr. Kerry said, "Two hundred billion for Iraq, but they tell us we can't afford afterschool programs for our children." Then: "Two hundred billion dollars for Iraq, but they tell us we can't afford to keep the hundred thousand police officers we put on the streets during the 1990s." There may be a focus group somewhere suggesting this logic, but one week after Beslan, it seems quite beside the point.

Sen. Joe Biden on this page yesterday offered a Democratic alternative worth a debate, based on "reinvigorated diplomacy." Sen. Biden explicitly says the Democrats would run out the negotiations clock longer than Mr. Bush did before launching a military attack. Well, this may be the Clinton foreign policy, but it's at least a choice. Perhaps most Americans want more talking; perhaps they think the time for talking is over. One wishes Mr. Kerry would break free of his internal polling, drop the bizarre link between Iraq and afterschool programs and put a real choice before the voters. It will be awful for our divided politics if come November, Democrats are blaming their loss on a flawed candidate rather than on what they proposed to do about terror.

Tomorrow at 8:30 a.m. in downtown Manhattan begin the official ceremonies commemorating the anniversary of September 11. But in fact at the site where the Twin Towers fell, every day is the anniversary of September 11. No matter the weather, knots of out-of-town visitors--from the U.S. and other nations--are always at the site's chain-link fence, reading the historical accounts hung on the fence or staring into the big pit.

Despite Gov. George Pataki's somewhat incongruous July 4th "groundbreaking" ceremony at Ground Zero, nearly nothing has changed in three years. A subway station runs below ground, but little else moves inside these 16 acres. Clumps of green weeds have taken hold in the tough dirt, and the stark, broken foundation walls seem alive even now with the ghosts of that day. The famous iron cross stands as an enduring memorial.

It's easy to pick out the Americans who've traveled to see this. Most are families, wearing the official uniform of the American suburbs--short pants, tucked-in T-shirts, white socks and white tennis shoes. In almost three years, I don't think I've seen a single person laughing near the fence.

It is people like this who are going to pick the next American president. It is people like this who live in the country's presidential battleground towns, counties and states. Visited constantly now by the caravans of Bush-Cheney and Kerry-Edwards, they live in places like Appleton, Wisconsin, or Chillicothe, Ohio, or Moosic, Pennsylvania. My guess is they're going to pick the candidate who can see straight from Ground Zero to Beslan.

Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

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